Venezuela's interim government is privatizing the oil industry following the US ouster of Maduro and effective seizure of control over the sector.

The workers who pull the crude from the Venezuelan earth and tend the vast machinery of the oil fields have a singular, fundamental interest: that the wealth of their own soil should serve the nourishment of their own people. They deserve a share of the bounty they extract, and they deserve a say in how the very ground beneath their feet is managed. But the decision being made in the halls of power, far from the heat of the drilling rigs and the dust of the refineries, does not include their voice. It should.

We are told of a transition, a reshuffling of names and governments, a new “interim” authority stepping into the vacuum left by the removal of Maduro. We are told this is a matter of legitimacy and democratic mandate. But when we look past the high-minded rhetoric of political science, we see the old, familiar machinery of capital grinding into motion. The story being written in the newspapers is not one of Venezuelan sovereignty, but of a transfer of title. The privatization of the oil industry is not a political event; it is a commercial one. It is the movement of a vital, life-sustaining resource from the hands of a state - however flawed that state may be - into the hands of foreign investors and the ledger books of distant corporations.

Let us apply the audit. Who benefits from this sudden opening of the gates? The answer is as clear as a bell in a quiet valley. The benefit flows to the financiers in New York, the executives in London, and the speculators in the global markets who view a nation’s natural resources not as the heritage of a people, but as a commodity to be captured, processed, and sold. These are the parties who gain the most from the “effective seizure of control” that is being described with such clinical detachment.

And who bears the cost? The cost is borne by the Venezuelan worker and the Venezuelan citizen. When an industry is privatized under the shadow of foreign intervention, the primary casualty is the social contract. The oil wealth that once, at least in theory, funded the schools, the hospitals, and the infrastructure of the nation is now being redirected to satisfy the dividend requirements of shareholders who will never set foot in Caracas. The cost is the loss of agency. The cost is the transformation of a nation’s sovereign wealth into a private windfall.

We see here the classic division move. The architects of this transition attempt to frame the struggle as one of “legitimacy” versus “illegitimacy,” of one political faction versus another. They want us to argue over the merits of the ousted government versus the interim one. This is a clever trick, designed to keep the eyes of the world fixed on the political theater while the economic theft is carried out behind the curtain. While the pundits debate the democratic mandate of the interim administration, the actual mechanics of the theft - the privatization, the legal frameworks for foreign ownership, the restructuring of the sector - are being finalized. They want the workers to fight over the color of the flag so they do not notice the hands reaching into the treasury.

The state, in this instance, is not acting as a neutral arbiter of justice. It is acting as the enforcement arm of the investor class. The United States, by facilitating this shift and supporting a government that prioritizes privatization, is acting as the guarantor of these new property rights. This is not a matter of promoting democracy; it is a matter of securing the flow of oil and the stability of the market. The state’s interest is the stability of the investment; the worker’s interest is the stability of their life.

What would it look like if the workers of the Venezuelan oil sector recognized this commonality? If the men in the refineries and the engineers in the fields understood that their struggle is not merely against a specific president, but against a global system that views their country as a mere extraction site? True solidarity would mean a refusal to accept a transition that trades one form of exploitation for another. It would mean demanding that any change in governance be tethered to the ironclad principle of national and social ownership - that the wealth of the earth belongs to those who live upon it and work it.

The tragedy of the modern age is that we are taught to view these shifts as inevitable, as the natural movement of “global markets.” But there is nothing natural about the enclosure of a nation’s resources. It is a deliberate, calculated act of power. We must look at the hands that hold the pen when these privatization contracts are signed, and we must recognize that the pen is often guided by the same interests that hold the sword. The struggle for the oil of Venezuela is the struggle for the dignity of all working people against the encroaching tide of a borderless, predatory capital.